Food safety incidents don't stay local anymore. A contaminated batch produced in one facility can reach consumers on multiple continents before anyone realises something is wrong. That shift in scale is exactly why the 3-A sanitary standards, a framework that has been evolving for almost a century, continue to matter for everyone who designs, buys, or operates food production equipment.
In this episode of Behind Clean Lines, host Mikkel Svold is joined by two guests with very different relationships to hygienic design.
Gabe Miller is a 3-A Certified Conformative Evaluator (CCE) who served as chair of the committee that developed the 3-A General Standards. He has spent his career inspecting food production equipment for compliance, and he continues to collaborate with EHEDG as a trainer at their conferences.
Tue Skrubbeltrang is Sales Director for EMEA and APAC at NGI A/S, where he works with around 5,000 OEM customers worldwide. Between them, they cover the regulatory, engineering, and commercial sides of a conversation that too rarely happens in the same room.
The occasion is the third major iteration of the 3-A General Standards, recently released. Rather than imposing sweeping new requirements, it clarified language that had been causing genuine disputes in the field, expanded the tables of accepted materials to reflect modern production realities, and updated the framework to accommodate newer manufacturing technologies such as 3D printing and injection-moulded metals. Listen in for an unusually candid look at what the standards actually demand, where the industry keeps getting it wrong, and why the biggest risk in food safety today may not be what you think it is.
Episode Contents00:00 – Opening: The contamination mystery that took a year to solve
01:11 – Introduction: Why the 3A standards update matters now
03:35 – The 3A standards: a century of food safety, and how they are made
09:35 – Is hygienic design more expensive? Breaking the myth
11:06 – What the latest update actually changed
16:43 – New manufacturing technologies and what the standards now allow
17:58 – Defining product contact surfaces: where most people get it wrong
21:49 – Edge cases: conveyor belts, bearings, and the one-inch rule
25:51 – Non-product contact surfaces and the door frame listeria case
30:58 – Cleanability as commercial advantage: downtime, cost, and the 30-year argument
33:43 – 3A and EHEDG: convergence, differences, and cross-border certification
37:54 – Wishlist: knowledge first, not stricter standards
In This Episode
What the latest update to the 3-A General Standards actually changed, and what was deliberately left the same
Why the definition of "product contact surface" reaches well beyond the surfaces your product visibly touches
How a year-long listeria problem in a meat processing plant was traced back to the hollow bottom of a door frame
Why bearings demand careful hygienic consideration even when they sit outside the product contact zone
How the 3-A and EHEDG standards are converging, and where genuine differences in approach remain
Resources Mentioned
3-A Sanitary Standards (the long-standing framework governing hygienic design of food production equipment in the US)
EHEDG, European Hygienic Engineering and Design Group (the European hygienic design framework, with growing harmonisation agreements with 3-A)
Contact and Follow
Questions, topic ideas, or guest suggestions:
[email protected]Find more episodes here.
This podcast is brought to you by NGI A/S.
This podcast is produced by Montanus.
Ireland